


Our Sense of Dreaming

by radiochattertherapy (murderousCohort)



Series: & the valkyries looked on in shame [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood, Dreams, Loneliness, prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-24
Updated: 2016-02-24
Packaged: 2018-05-22 22:36:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6096198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/murderousCohort/pseuds/radiochattertherapy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i> He wakes up with bruised knuckles and the scent of blood filling his lungs like a painful miasma. He blinks once, twice, thrice, and forgets the familiar taste of fear. The purple beads tangled around his wrist gleam in the low light of the lamp- he has fallen asleep in the process of writing down the words he dreamed the previous night. </i> </p><p>Gabriel is a sixteen year old living in a difficult world. He wakes up from a strange dream and discovers that he has memories that don't belong to him, and ideas that he doesn't agree with, that weren't there the previous day. He wakes up a second time and realizes that he has never seen this forest. He embarks on a journey with his companion to find the friend he replaced, and discovers in the process many things about himself and his companion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Sense of Dreaming

He wakes up with bruised knuckles and the scent of blood filling his lungs like a painful miasma. He blinks once, twice, thrice, and forgets the familiar taste of fear. The purple beads tangled around his wrist gleam in the low light of the lamp- he has fallen asleep in the process of writing down the words he dreamed the previous night.

The clock reads 4:32 in the early hours, and he turns it around so that the little numbers don't feel like faces watching him. He suddenly feels a shifting, crackling unsteadiness, and he grabs the edge of the desk so he doesn't tip off the face of the earth.

He had dreamed of monsters.

Halfway around the world, somebody else wakes up, and finds that their face tastes of salt and that their eyes are gummed shut with the sourness that comes with upset. The sun is setting around them, and they sit up in their little bunk and close the portholes.

They remember, later, that they had dreamed of someone, but by that time, they cannot remember who it was that grabbed their attention. They feel shaken inside whenever they think about the person from their dream. Later, they remember a name- Gabriel. Gabriel, the angel boy.

And he, the angel, remembers the faint scent of salt, and wonders who it comes from.

 

Four days pass before he dreams again. He spends them doing the same thing over, over, over. Repeating the same dull tasks. He feels like a broken record, trapped on repeat.

The average day, for him, is mediocre and bland, a structured schedule full of work and other people's talking and the feeling that he has lost something. He gets home and leaves his backpack in the mudroom, trading it for a satchel that he loops over his shoulder. 

He finds his way out the backdoor into a forest that seems more familiar than he remembers (because despite living in this locale for as many years as he has marked off on his calendar, he has not ventured out into these woods for several months- since the months grew cold and the leaves tumbled like his spirits from the gray sky).

He takes a familiar path that traces its way through the field and over the stream and into the cool dim light of the forest. When he is nestled against the home-like trunk of his old tree, he looks up at the sky, and then down at his paper, and draws from his dream a face that seems eerily familiar- like he has seen them, somewhere. Like they are close to him, like someone he had known and forgotten. 

He lets the page drift into the river and tries again. This time he draws a face he knows- the face of a clock. He draws it over and over, and then he looks up and draws the trees. He draws the sky, and the area that surrounds him. He draws until his hand is numb and his fingers tremble from exhaustion. And then he finds himself exhausted mentally and lets his head rest against the tree trunk. His satchel rests beside him like a promise of safety, and he smiles at it.

Predictably, he falls asleep again. He dreams of silent rooms and stopped clocks and the smell of rain. He dreams of mud and trickling brooks and then his dream sloshes into the ocean. And then he dreams that he is a bird and he is drowning, pulled down by the waves and the weight of his wings.

He wakes up and he is drowning. He's drowning in salted waves, and for a split second he thinks are these tears? Is sorrow literally killing me? before he realizes that he is going to drown if he doesn't just do something. So he does, and he kicks upwards, and he breaks the surface and breaks free.

It hurts to breathe, and he retches water and gags on the cold. He's shaking so hard that he can't swim, and he dips back under several times before he manages to float.

Then he takes in his surroundings, and at that, he nearly does sink again. Because this is so distinctly not his own home. This place is as unfamiliar and alien as he possibly could imagine it.

The water is not like a sight he has seen- it is opaque and dark, like the sky (which is ink) and there is no beach in sight. He is barely keeping afloat in an empty sea, and he is mortally afraid that he will drown. Normally, water had never scared him. But now the idea terrifies him. He chokes on salt that doesn't run in the water, but billows down his cheeks instead. He cries out, not words but a primarily non-human shout of agony and terror.

Nobody answers. God, does nobody answer. Nobody gives him respite, and he resigns himself to drowning.

Then he remembers dreaming, and with a stuttered heartbeat, remembers his sister's advice. "If you're dreaming and you're scared," she used to say, "you can always wake up. Just force open your eyes and remember that you're human."

Gabriel inhales and kicks below the waves once more. There he opens his eyes, and he presses a hand to his chest and feels a heartbeat. He breathes in water and waits to wake up, and he does not wake up. Lordie, he does not wake up.

He succumbs, because by then he has lost the string of bubbles like pearls that hold him together. He chokes and unfurls, thinking in his exhaustion, if I could just let go of the wings that anchor me, and then he tumbles down a very, very long cliff.

 

They unwind the fishing net from the side of the boat and release it into the water, because they have to eat something, and although they hate taking the lives of the tiny darts that litter the sea, they cannot starve to death. They let it out and pass a restless hour cleaning the deck, and then they begin to haul it back in and realize in confusion that it is far heavier than would fit a few fish.

A dolphin, perhaps. They draw out their knife and prepare to cut the ropes, but they pause after an instant, thinking.

Dolphins don't swim here. 

They're hauling it back in in a few heartbeats, so afraid that they'll be alone, that it's just a mass of garbage dragging them down again, not what they've been wishing for at all. But-

it is a boy. It is a boy whose face is pale and whose hair is soaked back from his face. He looks battered, seaworn, and his lips are blue from the cold. They purse their lips and look down at him, and know that they can't save him- he, their dream boy.

They give him a sea burial, putting him in the tiny coracle that serves as a lifeboat and draping a fine net over him. He disappears into the ink, and they watch him vanish as tentacles Engulf the ship. 

The world cracks in two.


End file.
